Google have confirmed a pilot project to “open up communications” with webmasters they feel are breaking their guidelines. Emails are being sent to selected websites flagged for removal from the Google index. In the comments of this post, Google’s Matt Cutts said “Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we’re removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we’ve also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe.”.

He went on to add “Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we’re taking action is a really good thing–a site owner doesn’t have to guess about what happened”.

If this is legitimate, and I believe it is, it could go a long way to getting rid of the unethical search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that many business owners don’t know their SEO company is employing on their behalf.